THEATER

THEATER; Hurricane Kushner Hits The Heartland

By ALEX ABRAMOVICH

Published: November 30, 2003

WITH two Tony Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and a stack of once-in-a-lifetime reviews, Tony Kushner admits, ''I don't need any earthquakes in my life.''

And yet he's heading into the most seismically charged week of his career: his latest work, the semi-autobiographical musical ''Caroline, or Change,'' opens at the Public Theater today; the first half of Mike Nichols's six-hour, star-filled, $60 million adaptation of Mr. Kushner's epic ''Angels in America'' has its premiere on HBO next Sunday. The cable network, which is also producing an adaptation of Mr. Kushner's play ''Homebody/Kabul,'' is betting heavily that the playwright -- who is a socialist, gay and so very Jewish (according to his friend Maurice Sendak) that ''it hurts your eyes'' -- is ready for prime time. ''Angels'' will be broadcast and rebroadcast to more than 30 million homes, and the number of people who see it the very first night should easily outnumber those who have seen the play in the several hundred North American stage productions since it opened on Broadway 10 years ago.

It is hard to imagine a more frenetic, suspenseful moment, but Mr. Kushner has a coping strategy: he simply adds more commitments. Three weeks ago, he could be found in Nashville, at Vanderbilt University, a campus where Confederate flags hang proudly in dormitory windows. During a question-and-answer session with a few dozen undergraduates, Mr. Kushner asked as many questions as he answered, spent a good 10 minutes discussing set design with an engineering major and had to be dragged away to an appointment with the school's chancellor. Afterward, he gave a public reading of his latest work-in-progress, ''Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy,'' which envisions Laura Bush reading the Grand Inquisitor chapter of ''The Brothers Karamazov'' to the ghosts of dead Iraqi children.

The reading took place in the university's chapel, before a predominantly middle-aged and elderly audience. What might have been a polarizing performance was greeted with laughter and applause. Later, Mr. Kushner gave thoughtful, lengthy responses to questions about Israel, AIDS and Ralph Nader -- every subject, it seemed, except the theater, which no one in the audience thought to ask about. As the crowd filtered out, an elderly man leaned over to his wife and registered his surprise at Mr. Kushner's performance. ''Smart Jew!'' he said.

''Getting Mother's Body'' by Suzan-Lori Parks

''Following Hadrian: A Second-Century Journey Through the Roman Empire'' by Elizabeth Speller

''The Best American Short Stories of the Century'' edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison

''Selected Poems'' by Conrad Aiken

''Motherless Brooklyn'' by Jonathan Lethem

''The Book of Salt: A Novel'' by Monique Truong

''Elective Affinities'' by Goethe

''Dry: A Memoir'' by Augusten Burroughs

''Horace: A Life'' by Peter Levi

''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' by Mark Twain

''Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath'' by Kate Moses

''The Charterhouse of Parma'' by Stendhal

-- Books on Tony Kushner's

bedside table

MR. KUSHNER is 47, stands 5 feet 11 inches tall and dresses casually in khakis and crewneck sweaters, unless he is appearing before a large audience, when he wears a dark suit and bow tie. In person, he is as intense and impassioned, but less serious and self-satisfied, than his work and string of accolades might lead you to expect. His conversation is quick, emphatic, torrential -- it comes in complete paragraphs, which themselves come complete with footnotes, jokes and marginalia. The word ''dialectic'' puts in frequent appearances, and questions about God are liable to be answered with references to 18th-century astronomers.

The verbal barrage is something Mr. Kushner inherited from his mother and perfected as a high school debating champion. He was brought up in Lake Charles, La., in a house that looks very much like the set of ''Caroline, or Change.'' (The character of Caroline herself is modeled, in part, on that of the Kushner family's own maid, Maudi Lee Davis. The boy, Noah, is a conflation of Mr. Kushner and his brother, Eric.) His father is a clarinetist and conductor. His mother, who died of lung cancer shortly after seeing one of the first performances of ''Angels in America,'' at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, was a bassoonist who recorded with Stravinsky in the 1950's and a gifted amateur actress. Mr. Kushner dates his love of the theater to watching her in local productions of ''The Diary of Anne Frank'' and ''Death of a Salesman.''

Mr. Kushner studied literature at Columbia University and contemplated nursing or law as possible career paths. By his senior year, he had immersed himself in Shakespeare, discovered Bertolt Brecht and settled on the theater. For him, art and politics have always gone hand in hand. ''Brecht was like a light bulb going off,'' he says. ''He teaches you that within what is apparently a naturally occurring event lies a web of human labor and relationships. He teaches you to see that something can be the thing it's supposed to be, and not, at the same time. I got Marx, I think, through Brecht, and realized that the theater is astonishing in the way it presents that paradoxical sensation.''